In a conventional clinical examination, prescribed items of examinations are performed on each specimen (examination sample provided by a subject for an examination) and the condition of the subject is judged based on the results of its analysis. Particularly, automatic analyzing devices that analyze multiple specimens in a short time have been developed recently, and are introduced in places where clinical examination is needed, such as a laboratory in a hospital. The advance of the clinical examination technology has realized highly reliable examinations and a highly reliable judgment of conditions of subjects based on the results of the examinations.
There is a previous-value check method of determining whether an examination has been performed properly for examination data by comparing a present examination result with a previous examination result for the same subject. This previous-value check method determines that the validity of an examination for present examination data is questionable when present examination data takes an extremely low value contrary to the prediction that examination data on a patient, which, for example, has kept holding a high value, will be somewhat a high value also in this time. The previous-value checking is performed on items that can be quantized as numerical values using an automatic analyzing device (Patent Literature 1: Japanese Patent Publication No. 2828609).
The present applicant has issued a patent application for a clinical-result confirming device that acquires the difference between previous data and present data, that performs pattern matching of the difference with a reference pattern, and that executes previous-value checking based on the value having the shortest distance (Patent Literature 2: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-114231).
There is a report on making a database of blood cell grain size data and performing clustering using a self organizing map (SOM) to classify cases of diseases and patterns (Non-Patent Literature 1: “Clustering of Leukocyte scattergram in allergic diseases” by Hiromi IOKI et. al., Japan Association for Medical Informatics, 22nd Joint Conference on Medical Informatics, Medical Aiding System/General Speech Session: Medical Aiding System (1), November, 2002).
The conventional technique, however, has the following problems. The configuration according to the Patent document 1 is designed for performing previous-value checking only on items that use numerical values. Therefore, previous-value checking cannot be performed using graphical data such as waveform data of protein electrophoresis and image data such as a blood cell grain size distribution chart. The previous-value checking on such examination data depends on visual recognition, and is thus inefficient.
While in the technology disclosed in the Patent Literature 2, the difference between previous data and present data is obtained to perform matching with a reference pattern, the direct meaning of a value of the difference is unclear. Furthermore, since the value of the difference appears in both a positive (+) value and a negative (−) value depending on the magnitudes of the values of the previous data and the present data, the previous-value checking by this method is difficult to be intuitively understood. Moreover, similarly to the case in the technology disclosed in the Patent Literature 1, the technology of the Patent Literature 2 cannot perform previous-value checking using graphical data.
The present invention has been achieved in view of the above problems, and it is an object of the present invention to provide a clinical-result confirming device and a clinical-result confirming method that can execute a previous-value checking on graphical data, and improve the reliability of determination of the previous-value checking, thereby reducing the time and work to be spent on unnecessary re-examinations, and a computer program for making a computer execute the method.